Global Arc

In Latin America, the extraction of silver, dyes, cash crops (sugar, bananas, wheat), guano, petroleum, and more broadly water, soil, energy, and human labor embedded in goods from the 15th to the 21st centuries fed the rise of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. This impacted environments and human relationships with and within them throughout the continent. The seminar analyzes such impacts through the environmental history of subsistence agriculture, monoculture, deforestation, the control and degradation of water and soil, mining, urban pollution, conservationism, climate change, "sustainable development", and activism.

Memory plays an essential role in recovering the Asian American past. Since traditional US archives offer scant traces of Asian immigrants, historians have turned to personal recollections to fill in the gaps. In this course, we consider these alternative sources of history, including memoirs, oral histories, personal essays, (graphic) novels, and documentaries. How can these sources help us to reconstruct the lives of Asians in the Americas? What limitations do they hold? And how do they challenge the notion of historical knowledge?

This course will examine the history of anti-Judaism from antiquity to the present as an enduring and protean prejudice. It will examine how a series of thinkers - some famous, some less so, some recent, some ancient, some Jews and some not - have used Judaism as a category against which to construct their own ideas. The course will begin in antiquity, in the worlds of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, continue through early and later Christianity, and conclude in the modern period. It will examine both the fundamental distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism as well as the considerable overlaps.

Adolf Hitler did not only seek to remake German society: he sought to remake world order. This course analyzes Nazi Germany as an international problem and challenge. Topics include Nazism's origins in World War One and the peace of 1919, its critique of liberal internationalism, its rival vision of international order based on race, Lebensraum, and imperial "great blocs," fascist internationalism, the Nazi occupation of Europe, the waging of global war, the Holocaust, and the international repercussions of Nazi defeat including the Nuremberg Trials, crimes like genocide, and memory politics.

Throughout their histories, science and film have been woven together. Film is a medium of communication enabled by scientific research; science is a way of knowing depicted in cinema; and scientific communities use film as a tool of knowledge production. This class explores these entangled histories from film's 19th-c experimental origins through to 21st-c cinematic depictions of scientific ideas. Along the way, we discuss the development of new forms of visualization, the politics of representation, and the power of science and film as means of communications. Weekly assignments include engaging with both textual and filmic sources.

Although the queer and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is well-known in popular media for her middle name, "pay it no mind," among her contemporaries she is better remembered for lingering on street corners and asking passersby "spare change for a starving queen?" Using a racial capitalist framework, this course examines the history of gender and sexual diversity in the United States from the pre-colonial period to the present. We will read work by historians of sexuality and gender alongside scholars of Black and Brown labor as we ask how U.S. history looks different when we center sexual and gender nonconforming working-class populations.

This course considers changes in U.S. law that moved from collective notions of the public order to individual rights, a transition that involved profound shifts in people's expectations about who made law and what law should do. The course opens up a rich, layered legal past, one in which the law was never a single thing and was always in motion: it was a source of authority that mediated and shaped social and political conflicts within the United States, even as those conflicts also changed the law. You will leave class with an overview of U.S. legal history and an appreciation for the complicated roots of current legal issues.

This course explores how medicine developed in Europe between 1100-1700. How did medieval and early modern people think about the body and the causes of disease? How did society regulate medical practice and cope with public health crises? And what was it like to be sick? We will trace innovations in surgery, anatomy, and midwifery, and explore how healers balanced Greek and Arabic medical knowledge with practical experience and observation. We will also examine the role of herbal remedies, religious healing, astrology, alchemy, and the rise of global commerce in medicinal drugs.

Over the past 20 years or so, critics of "liberalism" from both right and left have gained significant traction in countries across the world. But quite what counts as liberalism and how we should understand its flaws has been a point of continual debate. In this course, we take a historical perspective on these criticisms, looking at the traditions of political and social thought that have challenged liberalism across the 19th and 20th centuries. We focus on Marxism and Catholic social theory, both in their moments of most radical criticism of liberalism and in their periodic attempts to reconcile with it.

The ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza that followed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, has catalyzed global debate about history, identity, morality, and legality. This course pursues an intellectual history of the present by situating the torrent of journalistic and scholarly work now being published on these subjects-their ideas, authors, texts, and arguments-in historical context. How do reason, ideology, and diverse modes of interpretation-historical, political, strategic, epistemological, and identitarian-shape this discussion? What is the meaning and function of History in these debates?